
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 17 min ago
GNOME's Mutter Finally Wires Up Middle Button Click Emulation
Coming just past the GNOME 3.36.0 release is the merging of a year-old patch-set to tie in middle mouse button click emulation with libinput for Mutter...
KDE Seeing System Tray Improvements, Much Faster Shadowed Rectangles
The Coronavirus doesn't appear to be impacting KDE development speed at all as it's been another week seeing a ton of feature activity for this open-source desktop...
Shortwave Sees First Stable Release As GNOME Internet Radio Player
After being in development for two years, GNOME Shortwave has seen its first stable release shortly after this week's GNOME 3.36 desktop debut...
Linux 5.7 To Bring Mitigation For Intel Gen7 Ivybridge/Haswell "iGPU Leak"
Back in January "iGPU Leak" was disclosed as CVE-2019-14615 as an information leakage vulnerability affecting Intel's graphics architecture leading to both register and local memory leaks. While Intel "Gen9" graphics were patched right away on the disclosure date and Gen8 Broadwell graphics were already mitigated, Gen7/Gen7.5 graphics took longer... In fact, not until the Linux 5.7 release this spring is there the mitigation for iGPU Leak...
Rust-Based Redox OS Working On Pkgar For Package Management
It's been a while since having news on Redox OS as the Rustlang-written open-source operating system. But it turns out that's been due to Jeremy Soller being busy working on Pkgar as a new package management format for the operating system...
Intel Tiger Lake Gen12/Xe Graphics Driver Support Considered Stable With Linux 5.7
Over the past year we have seen a steady flow of Intel Tiger Lake "Gen12" graphics enablement for the Linux kernel, their first generation also adopting the Xe Graphics branding as part of their discrete GPU initiative. With the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring will be the first release where the Gen12 graphics support is there by default as a sign of stability...
Wine-Staging 5.4 Released With Additions Around Tasklist, XACT Audio
Hot off yesterday's release of Wine 5.4 with Unicode 13 and text drawing for D3DX9, Wine-Staging 5.4 is now available with more than 850 patches on top of it...
Netflix Talks Up SVT-AV1 Video Encode/Decode Effort
Any regular Phoronix reader should already be quite familiar with SVT-AV1 and the other open-source Scalable Video Technology encoders considering how much we have been benchmarking them -- months before even before they were officially announced. Netflix, which has been working on SVT-AV1 in conjunction with Intel, has an interesting write-up for some weekend reading on the state of this open-source AV1 encoder/decoder...
WSL2 Reaching General Availability In Windows 10 v2004
Microsoft announced in their forthcoming Windows 10 Version 2004 update that Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) will be entering general availability status...
Fedora 32 Beta To Be Released Next Week
Fedora 32 Beta was deemed unready for release on Thursday during the initial Go/No-Go meeting but after reconvening twenty-four hours later the remaining blocker bugs were addressed...
Fwupd+LVFS Begins Rolling Out Firmware Update Support For NVMe SSDs
Moving forward it will hopefully become easier updating NVMe solid-state drive device firmware under Linux...
Wine 5.4 Released With Unicode 13 Support, Text Drawing For D3DX9 To Fix 10 Year Old Bug
Wine 5.4 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release and it comes with a number of improvements...
AMD AOMP 0.7-7 Released For Radeon OpenMP Offloading
Announced at the end of last year was Radeon Open Compute 3.0 with the new "AOMP" compiler. Today a new version of AOMP has been released for OpenMP offloading support to AMD Radeon GPUs...
LLVM 10.0 RC4 Released Due To Last Minute Fixes
LLVM 10.0-RC3 was released last week as what was supposed to be the last release candidate of the cycle after being challenged by delays already. However, last minute issues with RC3 has led to LLVM 10.0-RC4 coming out today...
Linux CFS Improvement Forthcoming To Help With Faster Spreading Of CPU Utilization
A rather simple improvement to the Linux CFS scheduler's load balancing code appears to have measurable benefits with helping to more quickly spread the task utilization across the system...
Intel Linux Driver Getting Skylake/Gen9 Port Sync To Fix 5K Tiled Display Issues
A four year old Intel Linux display driver bug around corruption issues when trying to drive tiled displays (namely 5K+ setups with dual DisplayPort connections) on Intel "Gen9" graphics hardware for Skylake up until Icelake could soon be marked as resolved...
Intel Compute Runtime 20.10.16087 Released With oneAPI Level Zero Support
Intel Compute Runtime 20.10.16087 was released today as their latest weekly-ish tagged update to this open-source compute runtime for empowering their graphics hardware on Linux with OpenCL and oneAPI support...
Intel Developer's Patch To Let SECCOMP Processes Like Web Browsers Opt Out Of Spectre V4
Currently the Linux kernel SECCOMP secure computing mode force-enables Spectre protections, which comes with obvious performance implications. When force-enabled, however, processes can't opt-out of the protection if they are not at risk to the likes of Spectre V4 "Speculative Store Bypass" issues. But a simple change being proposed would let such processes opt out if desired...
FFmpeg Squaring Away Vulkan Support For Its Next Release
2020 could be the year we see the Vulkan API seeing more adoption on the desktop outside of games. We are already looking forward to LibreOffice 7.0 with Vulkan rendering support coming out later this summer while the next FFmpeg release also has Vulkan support lined up...
AMDVLK 2020.Q1.3 Brings New Extensions, Performance Tuning
There have not been many AMDVLK open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver releases this quarter, but out today in any case is AMDVLK 2020.Q1.3 as their newest update to this official open-source Vulkan driver derived in part from shared sources with the AMD Vulkan Windows driver...